Introduction
In this video we’ll take a look at what the free version of Articles Anywhere is and how you can use it in your Joomla website.
Articles Anywhere makes it possible to place articles anywhere in your site by placing - what we call - a plugin tag.
The Free version allows you to place single articles, while with the Pro Version you can place multiple articles by filtering them by category, tags and much more.
Now, let’s take a look at the basics of the Free version of Articles Anywhere. We’ll get into the Pro version in the next video.
We can place articles inside other articles, or inside modules, or … well … anywhere we want. We can place complete articles. But we can also just place the specific article data we want, like only the title, or an intro text with a read more button, or just the attached image.
As you will find out, Articles Anywhere is a powerful and versatile tool that can help you in many ways.
To use Articles Anywhere we will - of course - need to install it first. You can view the Articles Anywhere installation video to see how to install it.
We now have the latest version of Articles Anywhere installed, which at the moment is version 7.5.6. And what you see here is a Joomla 3.8.7 setup. If you are using newer versions, things might look a bit different.
To show you how Articles Anywhere works, I have created a few articles we can play with. So we have a main article ‘Animals’ and 3 specific articles: ‘Cats’, ‘Dogs’ and ‘Guinea Pigs’.
We’ll play around in this main ‘Animals’ article.
Simple full article
Let’s start with a simple example. Let’s say we want to place the ‘Cats’ article inside this ‘Animals’ article.
All we need to do is place an {article} plugin tag in the editor, using curly braces. And close it with a closing {/article} tag, like this. The reason for this closing tag will become clear a little later on. Then inside this opening tag, we tell Articles Anywhere what article to use. So in our case ‘Cats’.
{article Cats}{/article}
When we now view this article on the frontend, you can see the entire ‘Cats’ article is placed inside this ‘Animals’ article.
Just a side note: we just now used the title of the article. But we can also use the alias. In this case it is simply (lowercase) ‘cats’, but it can be different than the title.
{article cats}{/article}
Or we can use the id of the article, in this case ‘2’.
{article 2}{/article}
These all work. Use whichever suits your needs best.
Data Tags
The default behavior of Articles Anywhere is to output the entire article you tell it to. But here is where it becomes interesting. You can tell it to only show specific article data through what we call Data Tags. So let’s say we only want to show the title and the intro text. Well, we place these data tags, using square brackets, between these article plugin tags.
{article Cats}[title]
[introtext]{/article}
Save this article. Back to the frontend. Refresh the page. And now we just see the title and the introtext. But hey, the title is just plain text. Let’s change that to a heading. We first place the [title] on its own line. Then we just select it and let’s make it… a Heading 2.
Save. And yes, the title is now a nice heading.
{article Cats}
[title]
[introtext]{/article}
But it would be nice to add a read more link at the bottom, so we can actually go to the full ‘Cats’ article.
{article Cats}
[title]
[introtext]
[readmore]{/article}
And let’s also make that title clickable.
{article Cats}
[link][title][/link]
[introtext]
[readmore]{/article}
There are a bunch of other Data Tags we can use to output whatever article data we want. Like images, publishing data, tags, category stuff, and so on. You can find all the possible Data Tags in the documentation.
And as you can see, we can style that data anyway we want by simply applying those styles here in the editor.
Now we placed this inside the ‘Animals’ article, but you can also place these plugin tags pretty much anywhere where you can enter text. For instance inside modules or inside 3rd party components.
Editor Button
Now wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to type all this manually every time? Let’s meet the editor button. Here we can choose what data we want to show. In other words: what Data Tags are placed inbetween the {article} plugin tags. So we’ll try to create the same thing we did before. We don’t want the complete article layout, so click ‘No’ here. Great, now we can choose the title, content and read more button. Exactly what we need! So yes, we want the title. And we want it to be a Heading 2. We don’t want the intro image in this case, so leave that set to ‘No’. The content? That should be set to ‘Intro Text’. And lastly we want the read more button. So leave that set to ‘Yes’.
Ok, now we choose the article we want all of this fromthe list below. Here is ‘Cats’, so let’s click this title.
And there we have the code we had earlier.
{article Cats}
[title]
[introtext] [readmore]{/article}
Well, nearly. We are missing the link on the title, so let’s add that.
{article Cats}
[link][title][/link]
[introtext][readmore]{/article}
And we want the read more button on a new line.
{article Cats}
[link][title][/link]
[introtext]
[readmore]{/article}
Multiple articles
So lets do the same for the other two animal articles: ‘Dogs’ and ‘Guinea Pigs’.
We’ll just copy and paste this twice. And replace ‘Cats’ here with ‘Dogs’. And here with ‘Guinea Pigs’.
And let’s add a Horizontal Line between the articles.
{article Cats}
[link][title][/link]
[introtext]
[readmore]{/article}
{article Dogs}
[link][title][/link]
[introtext]
[readmore]{/article}
{article Guinea Pigs}
[link][title][/link]
[introtext]
[readmore]{/article}
Ok, what does this look like on the frontend?
Well, look at that, we just created our own custom little blog page that looks exactly like we want it! This and a lot more is possible with Articles Anywhere.
Pro version
Ok, all nice, but we might want to list 10 articles. Or do this for all articles within a certain category or with a certain tag. Or all articles from a certain user. And we don’t want to manually repeat this whole block of code for every article. Well, this can also be done. But we need the Pro version for that.
In the next video, we will get into all the amazing stuff you can do with the multiple {articles} plugin tag that Articles Anywhere Pro provides.
Recap
So just to recap.
We have seen how easy it is to place a complete article inside another article or module.
We have learned how to make it only show the specific data we want: both by manually writing this in the editor and using the Articles Anywhere editor button to help us along.
And we’re now excited to see what the Pro version can do!
Let’s head over to the next video that will cover the Pro version.
Or, if you need, first watch the installation video to see how easy it is to get Articles Anywhere installed.